1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of mobile computing, in particular to window and application management on a mobile computing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile computing devices are becoming increasingly more powerful and functional devices. Many mobile devices are multifunction devices with multiple device roles, such as personal digital assistant (PDA), smart phone, cellular phone, portable media player, voice recorder, video recorder, global positioning system (GPS), camera and electronic file storage. This increased functionality has resulted in users of mobile devices increasing the number of applications to interact with, often in rapid succession. However, to access and navigate these applications, conventional mobile devices visually present only a single application at a time to users. Moreover, toggling between applications requires an application to be removed from the screen and replaced with a new application covering the screen. To further navigate each application, conventional mobile devices use menus occupying the entire mobile device display area.
Mobile devices use specialized applications to provide different functions, so increases in functionality have increased the number of applications used by the mobile devices. However, the compact size of most mobile devices limits the screen-size available to display various applications. Further, as most conventional mobile devices use the entire display area to display a single application, multiple inputs are required to regularly toggle between applications in order to interact with specific applications. Often, the currently running window must be terminated to access another application. These conventional mobile devices do not allow multiple applications to be displayed on the display area, so a user cannot readily toggle between applications. Additionally, mobile devices generally have limited mechanisms for some types of inputs, such as direct manipulation pointing abilities. The combination of these limited input sources and small display size makes implementing existing two-dimensional window management methods on mobile computing devices impractical.
From the above, there is a lack of a system or method for quickly navigating between applications and simultaneously viewing multiple applications on a mobile computing device having a limited-size display area.